The hairs on the back of Caleb’s neck are standing up too. He fights the urge to jump back into the car and lock the door. He had thought when he came back here it would be different, that his childhood fears would have been shed along with the Tonka trucks and the LEGOs. He realizes now, it doesn’t always work like that. Looking around, he had thought everything had changed. Flowers supplanted the weeds, pavement smoothed the approach. The gnarled, clawing branches had been trimmed back from the driveway; but now he sees that a fresh coat of paint, like makeup on the face of a whore, changes nothing. This is the asylum, the same as it was when he was a kid. A broken place. A ruined place. Abandoned. Maybe even haunted.
You shouldn’t play there, everyone said. They were right.
“Alright, let’s go visit your buddy,” Bean says.
He’s halfway up the walkway, so Caleb has no choice but to follow him.
They pass large pots of pretty flowers stationed on either side of the heavy, polished-wood and glass doors, before stepping into the cool of the foyer. The floor is made of brown and white tiles, alternating, and is polished to such a sheen it seems almost clean enough to eat off of. There’s a window to the left of the door, like a ticket booth at a movie theater. A lean, middle-aged man with a shaved head and a white, button-up shirt stands behind the glass and greets them.
“Hello, and welcome to the Dream Center,” he chirps.
“Hi,” says Bean.
“How can I help you today?” the man asks. His voice sounds a little canned from behind the window.
“Well,” says Bean, “my buddy here is looking for a friend of his who we think is being treated here.”
“Of course,” the man says. “The patient’s name?”
“Christine Zikry,” says Caleb.
“Of course,” says the man behind the glass. He turns and disappears into a back room, emerging a moment later with a file in his hand.
“This isn’t really a visiting day,” he says apologetically. “Are you a relative of the patient?”
“Yes,” says Caleb before Bean can speak. “I’m her brother.”
“Okay,” says the man, flipping through the file.
“Just tell her Billy’s here to see her,” Caleb says.
“It . . . doesn’t look like she has a brother listed as an authorized visitor, only her mother,” the man says.
“What,” says Bean in mock bewilderment, “your mom didn’t put you on there?”
“I thought she did,” says Caleb. “I guess she forgot.”
“Huh,” says Bean. “You see, ol’ Bill here has been off at college— he’s a freshman this year—”
“Sophomore,” Caleb corrects.
“Right,” Bean agrees. “Sorry, sophomore. Anyway, he’s been very busy with school and he has to make it back for summer school, so this is the only time he can see her.”
“Sorry,” the man behind the glass says. “We don’t make exceptions.”
Caleb has an idea. “Here,” he says, “I can prove it. I have a letter from her. See?” He pulls the folded-up envelope out of his back pocket, triumphant.
“Patients here aren’t allowed to send correspondence.”
“I assure you, it’s from her,” Caleb says. “It even has a Hudsonville postmark.”
The man raises the glass window and nimbly grabs the envelope out of Caleb’s hands.
By the time this registers in Caleb’s head, it’s too late: the man in white has already dropped the window again and is unfolding the letter.
“I don’t think—um—that’s a private letter. I don’t think you should—” Caleb stutters.
The man’s eyes are already scanning, line by line.
Caleb casually moves forward to the window and tries to pull it up without being noticed so he can snatch the letter back, but the window is now locked in place and won’t budge. He glances at Bean, helpless.
The man in white finishes reading, and his eyes flick back up to Caleb. He folds the letter and puts it in the front pocket of his shirt.
“Please wait here,” he says, his voice bleached of any emotion, and he disappears into another room.
“Shit,” says Caleb in an explosive whisper.
“What?” asks Bean.
“What? He took the letter!” says Caleb.
“So what?” Bean says, looking confused.
“What if she’s telling the truth, and they’re doing some twisted things to her? Now they’ll know she told somebody. They might do even worse things now,” says Caleb.
Bean actually smiles. “Come on, man. All that letter proves is that she’s crazy, which they obviously already know, or she wouldn’t be in here. Who knows, maybe it’ll actually be good. They can talk about it in their next therapy session and break down some walls or something. Chill out.”
But the black hole Caleb feels deep in his stomach tells him otherwise. He is about to voice this doubt to Bean when the man in white steps out of a door he hadn’t noticed before, to the right of the little booth.
“I’ll take you to the visiting room now,” the man says, handing Christine’s letter back to Caleb. But despite the good news, his words come out flat and bereft of goodwill. “It turns out we were expecting you after all.”
They walk down a long hallway amid the echoes of their footfalls, passing door after door after door. Some of the thick wooden slabs have little plaques with labels like janitorial closet, or medicine room, but most only bear numbers. The air is stale, sterile. Occasionally, they pass a hallway running perpendicular to their course. Looking down one of them, to the right, Caleb sees light spilling in from exit doors with frosted-glass windows and heavy bars.
Their walk feels interminable, but finally the walls of the hallway fall away, and they enter a large gallery with a high, vaulted ceiling. The floors are wood, newly refinished (he can still smell the sweet, chemical smell of the varnish) and covered with row upon row of cafeteria-style tables with benches. There is some artwork, childish stuff mostly, taped up along one white-tiled wall. The other wall is plastered with posters bearing messages like:
Perseverance:
The wings on which
dreams soar
It reminds Bean of his days in public elementary school, and the cafeteria/gym/auditorium where they used to hold assemblies. The principal (Jenson was his name; Mr. Jenson) used to raise his hand and everyone was supposed to shut up. Of course, Bean was incapable of doing that. Sometimes, he would just make up stuff to keep rattling on about, to no one in particular, until the other little kids would try to hush him, desperately hissing, terrified he was going to get them all in trouble, as he often did. God, he had hated that school. And those boring antidrug assemblies. And that cafeteria, which was just like this place, an institutional joint with windows too high to look out of and nothing fun to do and lame, colorful crap on the wall, all to distract you from the fact that you were basically in a prison.
“Christine will be down in a moment,” says the man in the white shirt. “Please have a seat.”
The guys comply, and the man turns and walks away, disappearing through a set of double doors at the far end of the room.
“Well,” says Bean, “here we are. Only with you . . . I pack for the beach, expecting a vacation of broads and booze, and we wind up in the loony bin. Good times.”
Caleb is about to respond when he hears footsteps coming from the same door he and Bean entered. At first, he thinks several people are coming—probably some burly orderlies arriving to say they know Caleb isn’t really anybody’s brother and to escort the two young imposters out of the building, Caleb guesses.
But instead only one shadow spills through the doorway, growing larger as the footsteps approach, and only one person enters the room. A little girl.
She comes closer, and Caleb realizes she’s not quite a little girl, but not quite a woman either, really. So pale . . .
Closer.
She wears a white gown, like a nightgown. Her long, dar
k hair is a knotted mess.
Closer.
She’s very petite. Her arms are tiny and her breasts barely show through the baggy gown. Her bare feet make a patting sound on the wood floor.
Closer.
She’s biting her lip. Her features are small, exquisite, like those of a china doll. Her dark blue eyes are big and arrestingly beautiful, but ringed with unhealthy-looking circles. They flit back and forth between her two visitors.
Caleb rises.
“Christine?” he says. There’s a mistake. This isn’t the little girl he knew.
Suddenly, so fast that Bean and Caleb both jump, the girl jerks her shaking hands to her face to cover her mouth as tears fill her eyes.
“Billy?” she whispers through trembling lips. Before Caleb can answer, she slowly reaches out to him, her arms spread wide, and takes a few small, uncertain steps forward. She grabs his shirt in her surprisingly strong fists, buries her face in his chest, wraps her arms around him, pressing her body hard against his, and begins sobbing so loud and shaking so hard Caleb is afraid she must be terribly injured. He looks down and sees no blood, only tears and a little snot, so he brushes her hair out of her face and hugs her back.
“It’s okay,” he says. “I’m here.”
And she squeezes him so hard it hurts.
They sit at one of the long cafeteria tables.
“So,” says Caleb.
“Shhh,” whispers Christine. She points to her ear, then all around the room. She is much calmer now, but to Caleb she still has the aspect of a squirrel that might dart away up a tree at the slightest sound.
He thinks back to the Christine he knew. The memories he has are scattered, but the few he’s able to pick out don’t seem to correspond with this strange person sitting across from him. Little Christine laughed loud and freely. She could burp at will (this was an impressive trait at the time) and run faster than Caleb. He remembers one event vividly—Dave Kimble, the neighborhood bully, had stolen Caleb’s (Billy’s) bike, and they, the inseparable three, Billy, Christine, and her sister, Anna, give chase. Anna fell out of the race first; she was prone to bouts of wheezing when she exerted herself too much and was usually the first to give up in such contests. Billy and Christine were neck and neck, until Billy stepped on a sand burr and had to stop instantly and dig the painful little thorn out of his foot. But Christine finished like an Olympic champ. She caught up with Dave and jammed a stick in the spinning front wheel of the bike, sending the bike to the hardware shop for repairs and Dave, who soared impressively over the handlebars, straight home, crying (and, Caleb imagines, to the doctor’s office in Bristol). That was the Christine Caleb remembers. She loved dirt and boogers and singing and ice cream. She was loud and happy and fearless.
The girl before him, though bearing a physical resemblance, will hardly raise her eyes to his.
“I’ve missed you so much, Billy, you have no idea; it’s been terrible. But how have you been?” Her voice is a soft Southern drawl.
“I’ve been pretty good. Just graduated, out in California,” he says.
Christine nods. “I’d have graduated—near the top of my class too, if it wasn’t for the accident.”
“I heard about that,” says Caleb. “Seems like you’re walking okay now, though.”
Christine nods jerkily and adds a distant, “Yeah.”
“So what’s with this place?” says Bean. “Are you okay here, or what?”
Her eyes become wide and dark, and she shakes her head and keeps shaking it, to the point where she looks like some kind of machine gone haywire.
“Why don’t you like it?” says Bean.
Christine snaps an index finger to her lips and shushes him so fiercely that he’s instantly brought back to the assembly days again.
The sensation is distasteful, and he shuts up.
“So you had the accident,” says Caleb, trying to walk the minefield without getting shushed himself. “Why did you end up here?”
“Mom sent me for the nightmares,” she says.
“What were they about?”
“Lots of things.”
“Like what? Christine, you can tell me. It’s okay.”
She performs an elaborate ritual of looking all around, up to the rafters, over both shoulders, and under the table. Satisfied no one is there to hear her, she whispers: “The devil is here.”
“What do you mean? Where?” Caleb asks.
“Sleeping. Close. In a cold, cold cave very close. And,” she says, pointing to her temple, “here.”
“The devil is in your head?” Caleb asks with a glance to Bean.
She nods.
“What does he do in your head? Does he say things to you?” asks Caleb.
“He put him there.” She points upward.
“God put him there?”
She shakes her head and mouths a word that looks like “arrester.”
Caleb just nods, uncomprehending.
Footsteps in the hallway, distant and hollow.
Christine looks over her shoulder at the gaping arch of the doorway, then back at Caleb with fearful eyes. She jerks to her feet and clambers frantically around the table to a startled Caleb, cups her hand, and whispers in his ear:
“They’re taking me back now, upstairs—you have to get me out, Billy, you have to, he’s going to cut me, she told me, he’s doing terrible things, I just don’t know, I just haven’t figured it out, but my dreams are gone out of my head and there’s something else there instead, something—they’re coming!”
She stands upright. Caleb watches her chest move beneath her gown in shallow, quick breaths.
“Do you have a pen?” she asks, staring at the door.
“Uh . . . ” says Caleb, feeling his pockets.
“Do you have a pen?” she hisses desperately.
“Yeah,” Bean says, pulling one out and handing it to her.
She grabs Caleb’s hand and yanks it toward her with surprising strength, bringing his palm close to her face.
“Anna told me to tell you . . . ” she says, writing, pushing the pen into his hand so hard with her shaking fingers that Caleb is afraid she might actually puncture his skin. “The clocks are ticking.” She kisses his hand, glancing back at the door with a look of wild determination. The footsteps have stopped, but there’s a shadow spilling out of the corridor. She squeezes Caleb’s hand, then drops it and walks away on her pale, white feet, across the room, through the arched doorway, and into the hallway beyond, where she’s lost from sight.
“Dude, what did she write on your hand?” asks Bean with an amused grin.
Caleb responds only with an absent gesture of negation. “Let’s go,” he says, and starts for the door.
No one is there to escort the guys back to the exit, and when they reach the little “ticket window” where the man in the white shirt had been, they find it dark and empty. They push through the front doors into the insect songs, bird calls, and blaring light of the world.
Neither of them speaks. They get in the car and drive away, watching the sleeping colossus bearing the dream center banner disappear amongst the green boughs of the forest. It isn’t until they’ve reached the street that one of them cracks the silence, and naturally it’s Bean.
“Dude, that’s messed up,” he says with outrage.
“Huh?”
Bean frowns and pats his pockets. “She kept my favorite pen!”
Chapter Five
“FIVE THIRTY-FIVE AM,” CALEB SAYS with a shrug.
He and Bean sit in the living room of the abandoned Mason house. After some major dusting and bringing the sleeping bags and backpacks in from the car, they’ve managed to set up a fairly cozy campsite in the living room, complete with a roaring fire in the fireplace, thanks to some wood Caleb gathered out back and the can of lighter fluid Bean found under the kitchen sink. The fire pops and sputters, casting strange, dramatic shadows on the far wall. The guys sit in a cocoon of firelight—no streetlight shines through the
windows, no electricity burns through the household bulbs. Still, in their pale halo, everything glows orange and feels safe. The fire makes the hot Florida air almost unbearable, but darkness would be even worse.
Caleb slouches in a wing chair and Bean lies on his stomach, sprawled across an ottoman.
“Let me see,” says Bean, and positions Caleb’s hand so he can read the writing.
“Ow,” says Caleb. “I don’t really bend that way.”
“Oh, you’re not double-jointed like your girlfriend, eh?”
“Ha-ha,” Caleb says distractedly. He stares at his hand for a moment, then continues: “And she mentioned Anna, but Anna has been missing for years. Everyone but her mom was pretty sure she was dead. But maybe she’s not.”
Bean squints at Caleb’s hand again. “I don’t know, man. Maybe an S. Could be S-three-Sam.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It means, of course that . . . um . . . I don’t know! I’m just here for moral support, anyway. This is all you, Sherlock. Maybe it is five thirty-five am. What does that mean? She wants us to rescue her at five thirty in the morning? I don’t think so. It’s five thirty in the morning and I’m either sleeping or drunk—in which case I’m still probably sleeping.”
“I think maybe we should be there then. We can just wait in the woods and watch, see what happens. Just in case,” says Caleb.
“Are you out of your friggin’ mind?” says Bean. “First of all, she’s crazy. Really, obviously, like, whacked-out. And if we actually help her escape, I’m pretty sure that has to be a major, serious crime.”
“What are we supposed to do then? She’s asking us for help. She’s counting on us. And granted, she does seem a little out there, but just hypothetically speaking, what if she is telling the truth? Wouldn’t we owe it to her to find out? I could even write a story about it and have it run in the papers and get the place closed down or something.”
The Sleepwalkers Page 6
